Month: August 2013

A musical about a scandal: Profumo The Musical at Waterloo East Theatre

Unfortunately, the Profumo The Musical gives us nothing new on the Profumo Affair. Everyone, including the Kray Brothers, seemed perfectly nice and ordinary. Can anyone remember what the fuss was about? At Waterloo East.

Profumo: The Musical, produced and written by Gordon Kenny, presents the events around the 1960s Profumo Affair in which John Profumo, Minister for War in Harold Macmillan’s Tory government, embarks on a scandalous love affair with young nightclub dancer, Christine Keeler.

Staged on the 50th anniversary of the “Profumo Affair”, the key question is why the scandal is worthy of attention given that it is only one of a very long line of sex scandals during that time. Even just a cursory overview of the last 50 years reveals that the mix of politics, power and crime around the Affair has to judged unremarkable given the recent depth of depravity around the Jimmy Saville affair, the sheer shamelessness of Silvio Berlusconi and the stunning staging of the trial of former top Chinese politician Bo Xilai.

Maybe that’s just it: Profumo The Musical exploits our continuous appetite for the scandals & affairs reported on in the media. As its opening number “You’ve Never Had It So Good” shows in its frenzied interpretation of the 1960s, there is a ready audience to voyeuristically view the sexual appetites of powerful men. In fact, according to the show’s press release, the musical is a celebration of the anniversary of the affair. However, as I viewed the musical, I became more and more unconvinced that it came anywhere near exploiting the controversies around the historical incident of how powerful men like Profumo have a habit of straying into the world of desperate young women, sleazy nightclubs and the criminal class.

Instead, the musical constantly chops and changes its viewpoint through its fourteen songs, more like a collection of tracks at a concert: each song giving the audience a glimpse of something potentially interesting, but none building towards a climax or finding a sufficiently strong denouement. I noted at least seven different themes that were left hanging by the end of the show: the exploitation of runaway young girls; the sexual appetites of powerful men; post-WW2 black migration; 1960s anti-establishment ideology; English class warfare; espionage & Cold War politics; and London’s criminal class.

Using such a rich mix of themes and episodes should be a strength in a production: unfortunately, inProfumo, the basic dramatic elements such as the set, lighting and costume design neither located any of the scenes nor give them an aesthetically satisfying feeling. A blandness hovers around the characters on stage. This impacts on the characterisation of key figures particularly badly: resulting in the unfortunate effect that the characters of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies are neither particularly sexy or desperately manipulative. Instead, they moved from cliched fame-seekers in songs such as “Movie Queen” to deliverers of moral messages in other songs such as “Bloodsuckers”. They also compete for the limelight with John Profumo and Steven Ward, who give their own side of the story in “Porno Blues” and “Jack in the Box”.

There is nothing to cry or laugh about in the show. More to the point, there is absolutely nothing that seems even vaguely shocking in the drama. The musical’s parodying of the Krays and Labourites Harold Wilson and Barbara Castles is simplistic. If only the Krays were a pair of buffoons knocking around London, spreading their charm. If only political events could be summed up over a cup of tea! Except for a couple of moments in the show, namely “Order In The House” and “Jack In The Box”, the mercilessness of criminals and politicians were bypassed for an easy sentimentality.

I felt in the end that Gordon Kenny did not believe in the strength of his own subject matter. The Profumo Affair offers a brilliant subject matter to created an edgy, hard-hitting drama but it requires the writer, director and the designers to break out of any ready-made musical genre formulae. The Profumo Affair is nothing if not complex and sordid: perhaps Profumo The Musical exemplifies the extent to which we have become desensitised to that sordidness.

The Pitman Painters paint their lives at the Richmond Theatre

The popularity of Lee Hall’s The Pitman Painters is evident from its sell-out seasons at the National Theatre, on Broadway and in the West End. Arguably, such success must make Hall’s play one of the past decade’s most significant English dramas to engage contemporary audiences in re-looking at “class warfare” in post-WW2 British culture. At Richmond Theatre.

The events of Lee Hall’s The Pitman Painters begin in 1934 as an unlikely group of Ashington miners are introduced to painting. The play focuses on how they go from “art appreciation” to gaining the attention of avant-garde art collectors through painting aspects of their working lives down in the mines and in the Ashington community.

Premiering at the National Theatre in 2007, the current production of the play at the Richmond Theatre is the NT’s On Tour production produced by Bill Kenwright, with Joe Caffrey as Harry Wilson, Philip Correia as Oliver Kilbourn and Suzy Cooper as the rich patroness, Helen Sutherland. The tour started in April this year in Chesterfield and will end on the 24th of this month in Swansea.

On a personal note, The Pitman Painters is the first play I viewed in January 2009, only days after arriving to live in London from Australia which, interestingly, was known in its colonial days as “the working man’s paradise”. It is a country which was also generous to post-WW2 migrant families like mine.

I remember speculating on my first viewing of the play that the achievements of the Ashington group were not dissimilar from the descendants of convicts and migrants who have gained recognition far above their social status: the fact that the group seem like strangers in their land was a fascination for me.

Undoubtedly, Lee Hall’s play has been responsible in its own right for raising awareness of the existence of the Ashington group and their artistic achievements. However, on viewing the play this time, I feel more inclined to agree with the 2010 New York Times critic who claimed that as “grounded in authentic detail” as the ensemble performers were, their characterisation often blurred into “an abstract, almost Brechtian chorus of voices”.

The reason for the lack of definition of individuals was due to the fact that I often found the pace of the dialogue in the first half of the play unnecessarily frantic. At times I even felt that I was looking at oafish miners with pretensions to do “art appreciation”, something I never imagined about the characters in the first production.

At one point, I felt myself reacting angrily towards assumptions that seemed built into the direction of certain scenes: for instance, in the scene in with the young model, Susan Parks, who arrives and attempts to pose nude, I felt the speed of the dialogue presented it as pure farce, rather than explore the possibility that the miners’ alarm of a young woman in the nude might be legitimately connected to deeply held conservative views of sexuality and relationships in general.

To my mind, it is that deeply held belief that offers a more credible view of the alienation from pleasure or sense of intimacy with wives, each other, and ultimately, themselves, that the play heroically explores.

In the second half of the production, however, the treatment of the arrival of World War II reasserts the power of the play in realising its central theme on how art is linked to the human need to depict the paradoxes of both our subjective and collective realities. Moreover, it shows how it is often absence that communicates the most about us, individually as well as culturally.

This is shown particularly poignantly in the absence of the young lad who, in the first half of the play, represents the unemployed of the Great Depression. In the second half, we find he has enlisted and that he is one of the casualties of the D-Day invasion. The effect of the lad’s departure and death is shown to have has a profound effect on those left behind, as once again they face the destructive force of war, which, ironically, raises the status of coal mining and protects them from having to do active service on any battlefield of Europe or elsewhere.

So what is ultimately to be understood about the Ashington group’s place in the UK’s art scene? And how is it representative of the “class struggle” present in British culture? It is hard to deny that Lee Hall’s play works as a kind of revisionist history of how the inclusion of the working class group adds to the dynamism of British culture as a whole. For this, Hall’s portrayal of the struggle of miners caught up in the sweeping world events as The Pitmen Painters depicts their lives and paintings as worthy of enduring significance.

Date reviewed: Monday 5th August 2013

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Why Fringe Theatre Is Vital?

The reviews on this site are representative of my work as a theatre reviewer of London Fringe Theatre between 2011 to 2013. As a theatre historian who researches in theatre entrepreneurship, I was left in no doubt that London's 'best kept secret' was its 550+ fringe theatre companies and organisations that fed the imagination and the economic prosperity of its artists. I look forward to further exploring the implications of what I viewed through reviewing-my-reviews in the context of what I came to learn about the inventiveness of the companies who continue to create work at the fringe.